


Red Right Hand

by PoppyAlexander



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Amoral John Watson, Amoral Sherlock Holmes, Bottom John, DFP Sherlock, Dark, Dom Sherlock, Dom/sub Undertones, Emotional Manipulation, M/M, Manipulation, Sherlock Being Sherlock, Sub John, Top Sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-16
Packaged: 2018-11-01 12:37:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10921953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoppyAlexander/pseuds/PoppyAlexander
Summary: Sherlock Holmes first encounters John Watson when he identifies John as the hired gun in an underworld murder. Twisting this knowledge to his own purposes, Sherlock presses John into service and makes him the unwitting subject of a long-ranging experiment. Little does either man know, they are a perfectly matched pair.





	Red Right Hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [superblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblue/gifts).



> This fic was inspired by a prompt from its commissioner, SuperBlue, and "Red Right Hand," a song by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds which I have waited twenty years or more to write a story to.
> 
> Commission slots are available for July and August. visit my tumblr (below) for details on getting yr very own Poppy fic!

**Private Journal of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective.**

CASE: Tailor found dead in his shop, shot in chest with слухи (Russian/“gossip”) scrawled on forehead. Indelible Ink. Left-handed. Non-native Cyrillic alphabet user; written as pictogram. Hesitation on и b/c backwards N feels unnatural/must be concentrated upon. Crack shot. No hesitation. Close range 10 – 20 ft. Awaiting ballistics but assume military or police issue. NTS: FIND STATS RE # POLICE/MILITARY WEAPONS UNACCOUNTED FOR, GEOGRAPHICAL CONCENTRATIONS, X-REF W EX-SERVICEPERSONS WASHED OUT, SACKED, TREATED FOR MENTAL HEALTH COMPLAINTS. Majority clientele Russian/Kyrgyz/Turkish mobsters/pimps/bookies. Word underground says Sasha Polunov’s gambling operation recently raided, dismantled. Lestrade of the Yard persuaded by hand to surrender Polunov’s books—made up to look like import/export—how original. Narrowing field of suspects from gamblers in deep debt, with much to lose if threatened. Books in Russian, encoded, some legitimate records, some fictitious. Lovely puzzle.

*

John’s sister Harry was hopeless. She’d been on the verge of irredeemable when he shipped out and though he’d prepared himself for what he imagined was the worst based on a few letters from Harry’s ex, Clara, seeing her was a shock. She’d let their mum’s house go, living in squalor with a single lamp and a mattress on the floor of her teenage bedroom, and by the yellow of her fingertips and eyes John could see her liver was failing. He’d only had enough money to keep the house from condemnation—hired men with a skip, a cleaning team in haz mat suits, a fella to stop the toilet backing up into the bath. He arranged a nurse to see to Harry every other day but knew the pointlessness of it; he’d set himself a limit of asking her to go somewhere to dry out and after the third time, he didn’t ask again. It was a relief to let go of any hope of saving her.

His hand shook and shook, itchy, numb, burning hot to drive him half-mad. No more doctoring for him. Being indoors too long sent him raving, feeling caged and unable to see what might be incoming. A bloke he’d known at school ran a gang of Tunisians who did wealthy peoples’ gardening and he wasn’t worried about John handling a chainsaw with his tremoring hand so long as he got the trees trimmed. Outdoors. To himself. Reported in the morning, got his orders, did his day’s work. Two tea breaks and lunch. He’d got a farmer’s tan and his hair was sun-bleached and no one bloody bothered him.

His pay bought food for him and Harry, though she rarely ate anything and when she did, it was only sweets, or plain bread. He kept the lights on, the water in the taps. Bought himself a pillow and slept in his parents’ bed even though Harry scolded him about it. The rest of his pay he put in an envelope and sent to Clara, for her son Archie, who kept outgrowing his football boots and his school jumpers, who wanted the new Marvel comics action toys, who had a chum’s birthday gift to buy, who had to pay dues for scouts, who needed to talk to a therapist every Saturday morning about his other mum who was too sick to take care of him anymore, but why couldn’t she just come see him? What had he done wrong?

John had to get out of the house, away from Harry’s nagging at him, berating him, drooling onto the kitchen lino where she’d fallen when she passed out,  all her endless wailing that if anyone in the world had only ever loved her she wouldn’t be a damn drunk in the first place. There was a grotty pub round the way—new since John had lived there as a kid—and in no time he’d found some kindred souls who liked to wager. On the pub’s snooker tables and darts tourneys, the football match on the wall-mounted telly, elections, American baseball, Indian cricket, horses, dogs, anything. _Anything_. He’d been up twenty grand at one point; three days later he was ten grand in the ditch because of bloody Manchester bloody United being so bloody useless. Within weeks of his first pint of dark in that smelly little place round the way, he’d bets in all over town, was wired and sleepless and scurrying to cover himself before someone came to smack him in the knee with a tyre lever.

John was barely a half-step ahead of complete, fatal disaster. He’d been home for seven weeks.

*

**Private Journal of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective**

People are tedious, of course, but one must collect them en masse nonetheless, for each is the center of a many-spoked, crisscrossing web of acquaintances, colleagues, cousins, and paramours, which makes them useful.

For example, the affable and ridiculous Mike Stamford, who it is my misfortune to know through the doctor who does postmortems at Barts (knowing Miss Hooper is less of a misfortune because she is so easily manipulated by a half-octave lowering of my voice). Being of a certain age and having trained at the very hospital where he is now employed, a casual mention of one of the gamblers from Polunov’s books—John Watson—set him on a course of nostalgic reminiscence; Watson had been a chum of his back in the days when they were still honing their skills. It was easy enough, then, having determined Watson’s usual routine through only three days’ observance by some of my field spotters (NTS: REPLENISH STOCK OF TEN POUND NOTES FOR DISTRIBUTION/H. NTWK.) to set Stamford on a path such that they would inevitably meet, as if by accident. Stamford brought Watson to me this morning. He is of no great height but stands taut and tall in soldierly fashion. Thin-lipped, plain, cheap clothes well maintained. Chin up but eyes shadowed and face creased in five places from frowning.

Have arranged to run him a bit; there is an entry on the Master List for which I suspect he will be a suitable subject. That lifted chin. The odds very much currently not in his favour. He will be persuaded to act in his own best interest on moral grounds, surely, but he will not go down without a fight.

_# 374: Make a Proud Man Crawl_

I predict it can be done in twenty days.

If only there were someone to whom I could propose a wager.

*

They were breathless with laughter, and from running, and John made a quip about how ridiculous it was. A knock at the door, a courier who wasn’t dressed like a courier and who smelt like piss and fortified wine handed him—Sherlock Holmes, _Sherlock_ —a clear plastic police evidence bag with a ledger book inside. Sherlock beckoned John up the stairs, back into to his cramped sitting room, parked him in the chair that faced the windows and paced the little room, paging through the book, looking only mildly interested, humming, sniffing, telling John he had an ongoing case, quite simple, a murder among organized criminals doing all the expected things—prostitution rings, sales of firearms, illegal gambling parlours.

John felt sweaty and cold. He worked his thumb against the pads of his trembling fingers, trying to calm them, wake them up.

“There are things I know about you,” Sherlock said evenly, sliding onto the chair opposite John’s and crossing one thigh over the other. “The sister, of course, but there’s someone else. Someone who is not, in fact, already a lost cause—I can only assume a child; so few people are not lost causes by the time they’ve reached their majority—and to whom you have obligated yourself.” He paused, as if waiting for John to agree with him, confirm his deduction. Perhaps gasp out a, _Brilliant!_

John knew enough to keep his mouth shut. The air had shifted, and something was set to detonate. John knew better than to make any sudden moves, lest he get his bollocks blown off. After a long moment of expectant silence, Sherlock’s expression changed to one of amused, begrudging respect at John’s not having immediately folded his hand.

“I know you shot that tailor, with a handgun not your own, and drew on his face a picture of a word you never learned the meaning of,” Sherlock intoned, low but not threatening. “And I know the precise direction to point so those curs at the Met go off trotting to find those things that will connect you and no one else to the scene, and the victim, and the ones who wanted him killed.”

John waited, dread coalescing in his chest from a free-floating fog into something much heavier.

Sherlock uncrossed his legs, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them. His eyes were quite narrow, and John held his gaze for as long as he could, but in the end looked away, a change in the atmosphere that spurred Sherlock to go on speaking.

“You’ve proven yourself useful, and not entirely tedious. I have need of an assistant. You’ll do.”

It was clearly not a proposition John could refuse, though of course he had to try.

“Not interested.”

“Yes you are.”

“I already have a job. And—like you say—a not-lost cause to support.”

Sherlock waved it away with an extravagant gesture and a scoffing expression. “I’ll triple your weekly pay, that’s no issue.”

John studied him. He was brilliant and strange, and John’s initial reaction to seeing him peering into a microscope, with his carelessly careful hair and trousers designedly tight around his thighs, had been to wonder how heavy Sherlock’s hand would be, pressing on the back of John’s neck. If one had to be blackmailed, one could find a less compelling villain to do it than Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock lifted himself slightly and his eyebrows indicated as he said, “There’s another bedroom upstairs.”

“And?”

“Well, I keep odd hours. Sometimes have to go to a crime scene in the middle of the night and can’t wait for you to find your meandering way from the suburbs to assist me. Unless you’re enjoying sleeping in your parents’ old bedroom?”

John had quickly learned not to ask how Sherlock knew something John had never told him, so he didn’t ask.

“It’s not as if I can say no,” John said, indignant at the way Sherlock had so easily got him over a barrel. The barrel of a stolen gun pressed into his hand by a furious Russian bookmaker with photos of Clara and Archie in his punch-bruised fist.

The corner of Sherlock’s lip drifted up on one side.

“No, it’s not.”

“I’ll go home and pack my things, then,” John said evenly. “And be back in the morning.”

*

**Private Journal of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective**

Subject John Watson has set his army-issue duffel on the floor at the foot of the narrow bed in the upstairs bedroom, which is a hastily walled-off section of the attic, particleboard partitions pasted over with scraps of the pre-tolerable-aesthetics-era wallpaper from here and there about the place. He opened the drawers of the chest, then closed each one, but nothing was placed inside and they were not bothered again. He stays ready—as they say in the parlance of his lately former colleagues on the front lines of the Afghan disaster—to bug out.

His smells are distracting. Top layers of cedar-and-tobacco weighted after shave (17 distinct perfume notes—NTS: FIND OUT BRAND, CHECK ACCURACY AGAINST ONLINE DESCRIPTIONS); detergent and softener; the oily-rainbow petroleum tinge of natural fibres corrupted by blending with synthetics. Beneath those, beeswax lip balm he could stand to use more liberally, though the constant lip-licking may be a nervous tic (why so nervous, Doctor Watson? You’ve only been shanghaied by an amoral pervert with an aim to set you on your knees; happens all the time.), or if Freud and any number of amateur body-language “experts” are to be believed, he may be signaling a latent desire to devour whatever is in front of him (i.e., aforementioned amoral pervert, i.e., me). The faux-musk, stereotypically masculine scent of his deodorant is redeemed by the low burn of his sweat-smells, detectable through it: A pleasant low growl of earth after exertion, bright salt and sandalwood when overheated, soft and wooly in sleep. I have yet to detect a whiff of fear-sweat on him, and I suspect I never will. He is a simmering malcontent, seeks any excuse to commit violence and never hesitates to throw himself in that direction a half-second after the way shows itself clear. He imagines himself righteous but he is merely rage-filled. One cannot but wonder which of us would win in a fight.

I am near sick with longing to see the crown of his bowed head.

*

“Tea.”

There was a silence long and pregnant enough to make John eventually give out a quick, questioning noise. “ _Hm_?”

“Make tea,” Sherlock directed, lowering his chin and raising his brow, his tone of voice indicating John was asking stupid questions.

“Fuck off, make your own tea,” John fired back at him, scoffing in you’ve-got-some-nerve fashion. “I’m your assistant _on cases_. Not your butler or your. Whatever. Governess. I’ll carry your coat and do your crime scene postmortem evaluations but I’m not going to fetch your fucking tea.”

Sherlock, strewn over the length of the sofa, half-dressed and barefoot, drew himself up to sit, feet planted and back straight. He gave John a penetrating stare across the sitting room.

“I don’t wish for there to be any misunderstanding between us, John. There’s no reason our arrangement shouldn’t be a perfectly pleasant working relationship. That said, we both know the circumstances which bring us together and I imagine we would both soon grow tired of repeatedly reminding ourselves of certain unhappy facts, and of having the same argument over and over again about the parameters, of which there is ultimately only one: I will make requests, and you will fulfill them. And neither of us need remind the other of the reasons why.”

John hummed, grumpy, considering. He drummed the itchy fingers of his left hand on the arm of his chair, raising his chin to accommodate an exaggeratedly thoughtful frown.

“Make no mistake,” Sherlock intoned, and John felt the low edge of danger in Sherlock’s voice wire-brushing beneath the skin of his forearms, “That hand you feel around your throat, is mine.”

John flicked a glance at him, icy-eyed and taut. After a moment, Sherlock collapsed and unfurled himself across the sofa once more, as if he had not just asserted ownership of John Watson’s person.

“Tea,” he said again, and closed his eyes.

John chewed his lips, and made the tea.

*

**Private Journal of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective**

25th: crime scene; late afternoon; picked up dropped glove; quarter-smile with brief eye contact as he handed it back.

26th: NSY; mid-morning; punched sexually repressed blowhard who insulted me; did not think I saw, so perhaps more for his own pleasure than a signal to me. Nonetheless, signal received, soldier.

27th: 221B Baker Street sitting room; late evening; offered me socks; excessive nervous tics indicate prurient interest in the feet they were meant to cover. Of some interest, though none immediate.

31st: 221B Baker Street kitchen; mid-afternoon; made tea without being told.

1st: coffee shop near Picadilly; noon; described in some detail war wounds he saw and treated; visibly discomfited and grim-faced but responded to prompting until I was through with him.

(NTS: reinforce desirable behaviour with consistent verbal cues: Very good. Well done. ~~Thank you~~. Good man. Good _dog_. Down. _Down._ You will stay down until I say otherwise. Until I’m through with you. Eyes down, know your place, know that I am

*

John got a new phone with a new number he gave to only two people: Archie’s mum, and Sherlock. If his sister died in their parents’ house, someone would sooner or later find him, but in the interim he was as grateful for her absence from his life as he’d been for his father’s, and then for his mother’s. It was almost as if she was already dead, which was a relief.

The extra bedroom in Sherlock’s flat was stuffy and smelled faintly of mould; the bed was narrow and dipped in the middle. In his bag were his four pairs of trousers, six shirts, six vests, boxers and socks enough to get him by, two belts, four shoes, a plastic comb, hoarded sleeping pills in a quantity sufficient to end his suffering, and his gun. Down the silent stairs, around two left corners, and behind a mostly-shut door was Sherlock’s bedroom. The nearness of it—the distance—was a pinprick irritation in the back of John’s mind. Just there. _Just there_.

Genius he may well be, but within the first few days John realised he was something else, as well. His eyes when he stared, and the way his face could reshape itself into completely convincing expressions—friendly grins, sentimental weeping, empathetic smile-frowns—masks he dropped in an eyeblink. John had an unsettling sense every motion, every word, was planned well in advance, with countless layers of ulterior purpose.

The two had fallen into an easy companionship, despite the fact Sherlock had drawn John in at the point of a gun. Sherlock was interesting; he could lecture on nearly any topic and John would sit spellbound, occasionally put a question to him which would elicit a grin as if he was pleased at John’s clever inquiry, and set Sherlock off on a tangential path of discourse. Of course John was no expert, but he rated Sherlock’s violin-playing fairly top notch. The science on the kitchen table was baffling but appeared well-organised and methodical; nothing ever spilled. And of course running at Sherlock’s heel through the streets of the city, investigating mysteries and exposing the bad behaviour of others was exhilarating. All that to the side, though, when John was being honest with himself, there was something about Sherlock that wasn’t quite right. Sherlock seemed to have only two settings: picking (at other people’s psyches, emotional wounds, tender places), and plotting (the downfall of others, revenge, gotcha moments).

The case was an apparent double-suicide, two young men slumped together at the shoulders, their arms slit from wrist to elbow, deep and raw, close to the bone, no hesitation marks, their bare thighs and bellies painted red with spilled blood.

“Suicidal overkill?” Sherlock mused to no one in particular, standing beside the bed in the victims’ shared bedroom, in a flat full of housemates-not-friends, who hadn’t even noticed they were missing until the rent came due. “The room was locked from the inside?”

His giddiness was palpable, repulsive. John kept eyes on him as he interacted with the detective he tolerated, who would swing by the second between parenting him and seducing him, though all the while Sherlock remained oblivious to it. Or. No.

He wasn’t oblivious to it. He was encouraging it. He was _creating_ it. How was he. . .

Late that night, standing together in the bathroom because the light there was better, both of them with shirt cuffs unbuttoned and sleeves shoved up to their elbows, and John was giving Sherlock a lecture of his own, on one of the only topics in which he was well-versed: meat and bone, blood and gristle and sinew, and bits that cleaved together and bits that cleaved apart.

Sherlock’s inner arm turned up to the light, his hand in a loose fist, and John’s fingertip traced a map as he explained the locations of veins and tendons, that of course such a deep wound would bleed copiously but the fact of identically deep wounds on both arms of both victims seemed incredibly unlikely to be the result of self-inflicted cuts; once the first arm was cut so severely, almost certainly the grip would go—severed nerves, connective tissue, not to mention the pain, the adrenaline spike, the blood making everything wet and prone to slipping. . .

John’s fingertip drifted in a serpentine trail, and he watched the gooseflesh rise on the soft, pale inner forearm. Sherlock wheeled away, into a cabinet over the toilet, came back with a red plastic matchbox that wasn’t a matchbox at all.

Kept them around, he breezily explained, to cut lines of cocaine—oh don’t look so scandalised, John, you can’t be that much of a prude—and he held a single-edged razor blade between them, pinched between a thumb and two fingers and asked if such a little thing could have created such devastation (there were razor blades scattered over their bodies, not bloody, not lying where they would have naturally fallen). John ventured perhaps with a box cutter or some other kind of handle, but no, not just the blade in someone’s hand like that, like you’ve got—

Sherlock caught John’s wrist and turned his arm up. John pulled, not like he could, but even if he had done Sherlock could probably hold him. Sherlock held him. Describing the motions with the blade hovering in the air above John’s arm, Sherlock asked questions: this angle? or this? what about a handful of blades, stacked up together? could it have been a hunting knife? or a chef’s? what about a scalpel? or some other, larger surgical blade?

John thought the surgical blade was a possibility, anything that wasn’t serrated, really; the cuts had been so clean. The big hand cradling John’s wrist was uncomfortably cold. John finished his reply but Sherlock did not jump back in to rattle on; he only stared. John flicked a glance at his face— _something about him_ —then looked down at his own arm, belly-up in Sherlock’s grasp, with a shiny new stainless steel blade six inches above the surface of his skin. Four inches. Two inches. One.

John shut his eyes.

“Open.”

John opened his eyes. The corner of the blade settled soft as air, just there, and John stared at it, at Sherlock’s curled fingers, his knuckles. John’s lips parted with an audible puff of his held breath. Challenge hung in the air between them, noisy, beating its wings. John was aware of the tightness of his fist, ready to fight, only by the shadows cast by his forearm tendons. The blade slid, so gentle there was not even a scrape, not even a red trail of irritation in its wake. It was only suggestion—invitation—like John’s finger against Sherlock’s skin. Sherlock lifted the blade away, went back to the start, set the edge against John’s flesh.

John let his fist unfurl.

Sherlock let out a quiet hum. John’s prick was hard.

“Very good.”

*

**Private Journal of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective**

The way he carries himself through the world, square-shouldered and electric with threat of imminent explosion. So still when at rest, eyes scanning for threats. Body still and eyes on the move. A disgruntled client made a quick move in my direction and John ran him off by merely clearing his throat and taking a single step, between us two. When he is like that, I want all the more to see his back bent, hands clasped as if praying. Begging. His forehead on the toe of my shoe. I can make him. I can make him. I can make him. I will make him.

(5th: 221B Baker Street; outside my cracked-open bedroom door; I was in a fury of self-abuse, and he paused to listen. We both held our breath.)

*

John nudged a plastic paint bucket with his shoe; it slid easily away from him, empty. He upended it in front of the window where Sherlock was standing tall and determined, eyes fixed on a doorway across the street, the car parked in front of it. His only fidget was in the tip of his index finger, counterbalanced by the thumb beneath his chin, tracing and retracing a small, anticlockwise circle over  his lips.

“Here,” John offered, and gestured at the bucket.

“No,” Sherlock murmured, stare unbroken. “You take it.”

“You’re sure?”

“ _Mm_.”

John hitched up the legs of his jeans a bit and sat, elbows on his wide-spread knees.

They’d been there nearly an hour; the flat had apparently been bought by a speculator, half-remodeled, then abandoned. Empty paper coffee cups and plastic tarps littered the place, and John had worked a partly-driven nail free of the wooden window sash as they’d stood there staring down. His thumb and forefinger were raw and tender as a result, and he worried them against each other, making the pain flare up his hand into his wrist. Watching Sherlock pick the locks had unsettled him, the smooth motions; the look on his face of absolute self-assurance; the dark, breathy sound he’d made as the lock gave and the knob turned. John wondered why so much of Sherlock’s crime-solving required commission of crimes, and reckoned a serious look at the maths would rank Sherlock among the city’s most prolific criminals, and now here was John, his not-reluctant accomplice.

John’s instinct was to make conversation at times like these, but Sherlock gave bored-sounding, monosyllabic replies—if he replied at all—and mostly John had given it up. He watched Sherlock’s finger thoughtfully, thoughtlessly, brushing his lips, and then his gaze slid down the side of Sherlock’s throat, a deep crease of shadow cut in it by the streetlight. Sherlock’s coat gave off a distinct smell of stale tobacco smoke and damp wool. The high polish of his shoes glinted visibly even in the darkness of the abandoned flat.

John cleared his throat.

“How much longer do we wait?” he asked, not impatient.

“If you’re restless, John, you should know you’re free to leave.”

“No. No, that’s not what I—”

“Until he comes out, or the lights in the flat are turned off.”

John nodded, though Sherlock likely could not see it even in his peripheral vision, and anyway it was quite dark.

After a few more noiseless minutes in which Sherlock only shifted his hand from his lips to the collar of his shirt, slow-dragging his thumb against the cotton, his opposite hand tucked into the bend of his elbow, John finally ventured, “Tenner says he just goes to bed, for a wank and a nice sleep. Try again tomorrow.”

“I haven’t got any cash,” was Sherlock’s reply, slow and distracted, and they dropped back into silence.

John stretched his back, rolled his head on his neck. “Reminds me of my army days. Long nights of waiting around for something interesting to happen.”

“Did it?”

“Yeah. Sooner or later, always.”

“How did you pass the time?” Sherlock asked, tilting his head but not taking his eyes off the street door, the silver car.

John huffed a half-laugh. “You don’t want to know.”

A half-beat, then Sherlock said, “Oh, I might.”

It was a reply so perfectly ambiguous it could only have been meticulously crafted to give off its distinct scent of provocation. John felt dared, and after another stretching silence, he edged the bucket forward a foot or so, and diagonally. It scraped loud and hollow against the exposed sub-floor. He turned his body slightly and bent forward at the waist, letting his arms hang, feeling blindly with his hands until he caught the nubby-slick surface of Sherlock’s obviously-expensive oxfords beneath his fingers. He let his eyes close as his arched palms slid up to rest in loose loops around Sherlock’s ankles. The blood was rushing around in his head, trying to find the way up when it had recently been flowing down, and he held his breath. The sharp tendons behind Sherlock’s ankles. The must-be-silk ribbed fabric of his socks. The jutting knots of bone beneath each of John’s thumbs. The full height of him, looming. Towering. John sucked a hissing breath.

Sherlock didn’t move, didn’t speak. John slipped his hands around and ran them up the backs of Sherlock’s calves, only as far as he could before the trouser cuffs tangled him up and dragged him to a stop, just far enough to touch the skin above the socks, and he wanted to dig his fingers in, knead the muscle, but he only caressed with gentle sweeps of his fingertips, indicating his place, then retreated.

He found the backs of the calves again, outside the trousers, Sherlock’s open coat brushing against his arms, and he raised his head, but only just, and nuzzled his face into the scant space between Sherlock’s knees. Rubbing his nose and lips, cheeks and chin, against the fabric of Sherlock’s trousers, slipping his hands up the backs of Sherlock’s powerful legs, around to the sides of his sturdy thighs, wanting to clutch, wanting to yank and shove, but gentle, reverent, awaiting invitation, craving acknowledgment.

_Well done._

John inhaled an odour of dry cleaning chemicals, craving something lower, hotter, and he hummed and went on stroking his cheek up along the front of Sherlock’s trouser-leg, fingers skittering soft up the outsides of his thighs until his fingers curled into the bottom edges of Sherlock’s hip pockets.

Sherlock kept quiet and barely moved. John was aware he was being tolerated, mostly ignored, and the stabbing need to prove himself worthy of Sherlock’s attention threatened to rend him open—blood and bone, a clean cut, insides exposed—and the ache of it was delicious, thrilling.

Sherlock’s contours behind the button placket, soft and hard and curved and rigid; John roared hot breath through the fabric, dug in his nose, and his fingers were sure and shaky as he slid free each button, so many, why so many?, licked them, clicked them against his teeth. Sherlock exhaled tedium, perhaps even displeasure, and there came a flurry in John’s abdomen that made him whimper out loud before he could contain it.

Nothing beneath the trousers but skin and hair and (at last) a veil of masculine scent, and John was careful about arranging the trousers’ placket, picking the fabric out and down, stroking it into place out of the way, and he edged forward on his makeshift stool, licked his lips and slid one hand behind to curve around Sherlock’s buttock, firm and just round enough. The edge of his coat brushed John’s ear and jaw.

With open-mouthed licks and gentle suckling, John brought Sherlock along, feeling himself melt into acquiescence as Sherlock grew to fill his mouth. Inside John’s belly flared a tight, hot desire to please him, _please him_ —him, so high and tall and unmoving, unmoved—and John began to mew and moan, then held his breath to slide down deep. Tears welled in John’s heavy-lidded eyes and he thrilled at the irritating, oily tickle as they oozed onto his lashes, gathering at the inner corners. He held his breath, took Sherlock ever deeper. He wanted to be breathless. He wanted to choke. To please him.

There was languid motion high above his head, the scrape and flick of a match, the smell of fresh cigarette smoke and the little whiff of sulfur. John drew back and let go a complaining noise behind his nose; he wanted his hair pulled, his ear pinched. He wanted to be thrown down and used up. Sherlock’s only acknowledgement was to rest one hand on the window jamb, checking his own balance. John gripped Sherlock’s backside in both hands and used the leverage to thrust himself hard forward, open throat rubbed raw, bitterly salted and coated with droplets he fought not to gag on. His eyes went on running and the corners of his lips pulled until they cracked. Sherlock went on smoking, staring out and down at more of the same of the evening’s endless nothing.

John fell back gasping, panting, denied himself breath to please him, _please him_ , licking a spiral and shutting his lips, bobbing his head, pulling Sherlock to him with hands clutching his still half-dressed arse. John pulled, and pulled, and sucked, swallowed, reached one hand between his own open thighs, stroked down against the front of his jeans.

Sherlock, snappish: “No.”

 John whimpered protest but removed his hand, wrapping it instead around Sherlock’s prick, pulling and sliding so the edges of his fingers met his lips as he sucked and sucked, and Sherlock drew in a great, deep breath forever, and then groaned it out as he spilled in John’s mouth, over his tongue, into his throat. John swallowed, lost some down over his lip, onto his chin, licked and swallowed again, and fell heavily away, wishing for something to rest his back against. The butt end of the cigarette landed between their feet, glowing yellow-orange until Sherlock squashed it beneath the toe of his elegant shoe. As Sherlock began rearranging his trousers, quick fingers fastening the buttons easily, John lifted the pads of his fingers toward his lips and chin.

“Leave it.”

John only rolled his lips between his teeth, ventured an upward glance, trying to discern whether Sherlock was indeed pleased. John was aching, and shifted his feet to adjust his posture, but Sherlock only looked hawkishly through the window at the street. John inhaled to speak, but before he could say a word, Sherlock whirled away from the window and strode toward the lock-picked door.

“We’re finished for tonight. Come along, John.”

Resenting it, grateful for it, John did as he was told.

*

**Private Journal of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective**

In the course of time it has come clear the sturdy soldier longs to break. To be broken. But he must be brought along in creeping increments. He makes my tea and my supper and my bed. He endures all manner of invasions with implements, playthings, body parts, and when he is on his back beneath me with his legs widespread and his eyes just pleading for my approval, my praise, he is incomparably beautiful. He calls me by my name, only that, but in a tone that begs me to assert myself, stake a claim. He is open to plunder, and I admit I am greedy about taking all that he offers. He submits to restraint, wears my ropes like fine jewelry, and to my delight he is even more compliant when given the challenge of being only symbolically bound: a silk ribbon wound around his wrists which he must not let slide; my fallen shirt-button held between his front teeth; his hands collaring my throat.

This last brought him to tears, which is what ultimately won me. These pages are the singular place in the world where I am unfailingly myself, without pretense, disguise, or ulterior motive, and so herein I proclaim that I am as much his as he is mine. I would fall on any knife, take any bullet, die any and every death, only for John. I imagine I might even tell him so one day, in a fit of brainless passion, when he has let me bring him low, and that beautiful void in him gapes open, inviting me to fill it with my power and praise.

He trots after me with next to no encouragement, faithful and vigilant, with a snarl and snap for any who might dare threaten me with harm, or even linger too long looking in my direction. Not merely the pet I anticipated, rather it turns out John is an attack dog. I would no sooner give him up than give up my fiddle, my memory, my good coat, or my reputation. We are a perfectly matched pair of perverse, conscience-bereft monsters.

But then again, there is still his purpose to fulfill. Putting aside my unexpected devotion to him, John Watson was chosen for a reason. He will avert his gaze from mine but will not bow. He will lick my feet but will not kneel. Therein, the ongoing challenge: after all, one’s knees must hit the floor, if one is to crawl.

*

John had brought Sherlock tea and cake, set them on the bedside table and burrowed down to wake him with eager but reverent mouth and hands; Sherlock had favoured him with a spill of cruel pillow talk, staring in a way that made John feel more than naked—skinless—until John had shuddered, painting trails on Sherlock’s belly and chest John cleared away with his own wet tongue. After, John massaged Sherlock’s long fingers and sturdy wrists, only to please him, and Sherlock’s hands warmed and turned faintly pink as the blood rushed in. John lit his cigarette for him, and set the ashtray on his own naked thigh, and read out the emails from potential clients, to find one that Sherlock deemed interesting. When Sherlock leaned to favour John with a kiss on his temple, John’s eye teared from the leftover smoke inside Sherlock’s mouth.

Later, nearing noon in the tomb-silent flat, Sherlock sat back from the microscope to stretch and blink, while John opened each of the cupboards in turn, thinking about feeding him lunch. Sherlock crossed into the lounge, found his mobile and sat in his usual armchair, one knee crossed over the other. After a few short moments scrolling his phone, Sherlock hummed quickly—surprise or amusement—and announced, “Text here from Lestrade of the Yard. A known Russian hitman has confessed to your crime as part of some deal they’ve made with him.”

It wasn’t that John had ever forgotten what had brought him into Sherlock’s orbit, it was only that the price had come to feel less and less dear. He’d have eagerly murdered fifty strangers, had he known. Known that Sherlock’s hand really was so deliciously heavy on the back of his neck. That Sherlock was overwhelming and dangerous and that cruelty skated the edge of his every exhalation. That Sherlock could bring John down with a word, with a look. That Sherlock tied such pretty knots, whispered such terrifying promises, accepted veneration as if it was his right, with a smug smirk and a disdainful sneer. John had spent a lifetime rigged to explode, and Sherlock knew how to defuse him. John would have murdered a thousand strangers to arrive in Sherlock Holmes’s sitting room on a late Sunday morning, having brought him breakfast, bliss, cigarettes, and tea.

John cleared his throat. “So, what does that mean?” He took a step into the sitting room, folded his hands behind his back, squared his shoulders.

Sherlock looked up at him, with one of his plastic-mask grins. “It means you can go.”

“Ah. Go?”

“We’re through here. I’ve nothing to hold over you; you’ve served me well and it’s all been very amusing, but now it’s done. Thank Boris ‘The Bear’ Kuznetsov; with his confession your servitude ends.” Sherlock looked back at his phone, scrolling with the tip of his index finger.

John cleared his throat once more. He crossed his arms in front of his chest to keep it from bursting. “Just like that,” he said flatly.

“I don’t own you, John. It was an experiment.”

John ground his back teeth together, looked toward the windows on the Baker Street side. He could feel in a prickling, agonising rush, the sensation of the glass and wood scratching and catching on his clothes and face as he flung his body through it.

“An experiment,” he echoed, and his voice sounded distant, outside his own head.

“ _Mm_ ,” Sherlock agreed lightly, “Yes. A failed result, I’m afraid. But it’s my failure, not yours, so nevermind. Anyway. Best of luck.” Another fake, half-second smile, his eyes flicking only briefly away from his phone’s screen toward John’s face.

“But.”

There was a long silence.

“Can I. Is there anything.” John sniffed hard. “I thought this was going pretty well, actually. If it’s about the money, I don’t need it. I can work. Between cases, I could. I could. I mean, I can—”

Sherlock glanced up at him casually, as if he might quickly look away again, but instead he set his phone face down on the arm of his chair, settled his fingertips against each other and brought his hands to rest just below his chin. His eyes were cold and narrow, and his stare made John shiver, and calmed him.

“Just,” John began, and his voice was thick around a strange pain in his throat, but his posture was upright and solid. “Tell me what to do, Sherlock.”

Sherlock’s expression shimmered weirdly, but immediately paled down and cooled. He held John’s gaze across the distance but said nothing. John felt electric with attention, staring him down. _Just tell me what to do, Sherlock. Tell me what to do._

Sherlock tipped his chin up and over, and his eyebrows rose a fraction— _paying attention, John?_ —and his eyelids dropped as he set his gaze on a patch of carpet close beside his foot. His lashes lifted once more, and he stared icily at John, expectant, inviting.

John frowned, and nodded, thoughtful, as if he might refuse. He licked his lips and let his hands fall at his sides. He’d have murdered the whole _world_.

 *

**The Private Journal of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective**

_~~# 374: Make a Proud Man Crawl~~ _

 

-END-

_*_

**Author's Note:**

> twitter: @FicAuthorPoppy  
> PoppyAlexander.com  
> fuckyeahfightlock.tumblr.com/commissions


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